author
William Ramsay
1852–1916
A Scottish chemist who helped reveal an entirely new family of elements, he changed the periodic table by uncovering the noble gases. His discoveries brought him the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and made him one of the key scientific figures of his era.
1 Audiobook
The Gases of the Atmosphere: The History of Their Discovery
by William Ramsay
About the author
Born in Glasgow on October 2, 1852, William Ramsay became one of the leading chemists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He studied in Scotland and in Germany, and later taught at University College London, where much of his most famous work took shape.
Ramsay is best remembered for research that identified or isolated several of the noble gases, including argon, neon, krypton, and xenon, and for helping establish that these gases formed a new group of elements. That work reshaped scientific understanding of the atmosphere and the periodic table, and it earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1904.
He died on July 23, 1916, in High Wycombe, England. More than a century later, he is still remembered as a careful experimental scientist whose work opened up a new corner of chemistry.